The McNay Art Museum has chosen to shine the spotlight on the award-winning (Pulitzer, Oscar, Tony, Grammy, Obie — you name it) composer and lyricist in its fall Tobin Collection exhibition, “Shakespeare to Sondheim,” which runs through Dec. 18.

Really, who else could be mentioned in the same breath as the Bard?

“We have a very good range of Sondheim designs, beginning with ‘West Side Story' when he was emerging as a songwriter,” says Tobin curator Jody Blake, “and I really wanted to highlight the strengths of our holdings.”

Indeed, the exhibition features Oliver Smith's ominous graphite and watercolor “Under the Highway” set design from the original 1957 Broadway production of “West Side Story”; three remarkable Tony Straiges maquettes for '80s productions of “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Into the Woods,” including a chess-piece rendition of Rapunzel's Tower; a cartoony, farcical model for the original 1962 production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”; a bird's-eye view of the urban canyons in the 2002 Kennedy Center revival of “Company”; even scene drawings for a Sondheim musical you may never have heard of, “Do I Hear a Waltz?”

Most successful, Blake says, are the designs from “Sunday in the Park,” the show about pointillist painter Georges Seurat, including Straiges' clever maquette of a scene of boys swimming.

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“Sondheim completely understands Seurat,” she says. “Those are the designs we are proudest of, perhaps because we are an art museum.”

But there is more to “Shakespeare to Sondheim” than simply Stephen.

“It's actually four exhibitions in one,” Blake says. “Rather than a uniting theme, I was looking more for a case of counterpoint. I wanted to sample different parts of the collection for a variety of tones and feelings.”

The other sections of the exhibition, which encompass design for opera, dance and drama, are “Gods and Mortals: Opera's Mythic Imagination,” “Bloody England: Shakespeare's ‘Richard III'” and “Not Just Black and White: Tchaikovsky's ‘Swan Lake.'”

Complete with costumes borrowed from the Metropolitan opera, including a gold-burnished breastplate worn by Placido Domingo as Aeneas in a 1983 production of Berlioz's opera “Les Troyens,” one focus of “Gods and Mortals” is the Trojan War. Other interpretive designs include Robert Wilson's lithograph of a scene in Gluck's opera “Alceste,” and renowned sculptor Louise Nevelson's abstract black and gold program designs (she also did costumes and sets) for a 1984 Opera Theatre of St. Louis production of Gluck's “Orfeo ed Euridice.”

“Robert Tobin, who acquired quite a bit of Nevelson's work, was instrumental in her getting that commission,” Blake says.

Here are painter Morris Kestelman's memorable set design for “a very disturbing production,” says Blake, produced at London's Old Vic and starring Olivier in 1944, as well as a “deranged” portrait of the great actor in the role; University of Texas ProfessorSusan Mickey's elegant costume for Richard — gray tights and shirt under a white fur cape — for a 2009 production in Chicago; Desmond Heeley's designs for a 1967 Bates production in England; and “memory images” by the great designer Robert Edmond Jones from a 1922 Berlin production.

“They are sketches, records of his impressions of going to see the production,” Blake says. “You can see what he really picked up on was the incredible simplicity and expressive use of shadow.”

Finally, with the Oscar-winning film version of “The Black Swan” still fresh in our memories, designs and costumes from productions of Tchaikovsky's 1895 ballet “Swan Lake” are featured. While Leslie Hurry's 1952 designs for Margot Fonteyn in a London Royal Ballet production emphasize the difficult dual Odette-Odile role's white/black dichotomy, Blake says, other designs by Yolanda Sonnabend and Kristian Fredrikson “respectively take color cues from Fabergé eggs and pre-Raphaelite paintings.”

Blake points out that, originally, the Odette and Odile characters “did not represent good and evil.”

“Instead,” she says, “these rivals embodied a more nuanced distinction between the worldly and the spiritual, appearances and truth.”